


Gâteau des rois

by forbiddenstars



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mention of Physical Abuse, Profanity, Usual Raven warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 13:30:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12985071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forbiddenstars/pseuds/forbiddenstars
Summary: Two Christmases with Jean.





	Gâteau des rois

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first exchange fic! Written for @midoriyaboi on tumblr, sorry it's a bit late! I've been flying around the country with patchy wifi. Hope you like it :)

1\. 

_Knock knock._

Jean looked up, on edge despite himself. It was evening, and he hadn’t known to expect visitors. It had been some months since he had joined the Trojans (since he was traded, his mind whispered unbidden, since he was given to a new owner) but a few months cannot erase a lifetime of conditioning, of a decade steeped in fear. He always hesitated for the barest moment before getting up and opening the door. In the end, if there was pain on the way, delaying it would only make it worse. Better by far to go obediently when called. 

“Yes?” He asked, as he opened the door. Jeremy Knox stood in front of him, the force of his smile bright enough to make Jean take a step back. His instinctive fear of his captain had dulled some, as the weeks had passed by and Jeremy had continued, incredibly, to be nothing like Riko. It wasn’t gone. Not yet. 

“Jean! How’re you doing? Did anyone tell you about the Trojan holiday party?”

Jean silently shook his head no. He kept to himself despite the Trojan’s best efforts, a tightly wound ball of nerves that loosened only enough to throw himself into practice, sit through his classes like a shadow, and then slip away to his room. 

“Oh okay! I’m glad I remembered to check in with you then. It’s next Thursday,” Jeremy explained, his arms gesturing vaguely, “At my apartment, after practice. I can give you a ride afterwards, sounds good?” 

Jean hesitated before he nodded. Something very close to a “No” was trying to crawl out of his mouth, but he kept his jaw clenched shut. Jeremy hadn’t really asked, after all, if he wanted to go. And for Jean, acquiescence was as natural as breathing when it came to his captain. 

“Ah, ok,” Jeremy seemed a bit deflated by his lack of response, but forged on, “Great! Sounds like a plan. See you tomorrow!” 

Jean waited until Jeremy was gone, his door safely shut and locked, before sitting down on the bed and contemplating what just happened. Holiday parties were not something he was familiar with. The Master had considered them frivolous, and Riko had always been in a foul mood. Holidays meant more reminders that he was the spare, to be hidden from sight while Ichirou was showcased as the rising heir. Riko in a foul mood meant that Jean would have an unpleasant time, it was a pretty simple equation.

But as he remembered Jeremy’s guileless smile, he felt something oddly like courage unfurl in his stomach. How hard could it be? He had gone three months without disaster, he could handle one party. 

He came to realize, later, that he had forgotten to account for the fact that disaster had been avoided, perhaps, because on one hand, he was repressing so much that he could barely think, and on the other, he had done his level best to avoid speaking more than absolutely necessary while around the team. 

\-- 

“Jeremy, I’m not going to say it again. You need to do something about Jean.” 

Jeremy winced. Alvarez’s voice was irate but quiet, cold in a way that her bouts of temper were not. Then he sighed. Jean’s ongoing silence and frigidity was wearing on all of them. It was hard to read his stony face, and the curt, bitten-off snippets that escaped him were exclusively limited to Exy, usually pointing out their shortcomings. Even the golden team of college Exy had a limit, and that limit probably came somewhere in between a new member brushing off every overture of friendship, and only opening his mouth to tell them how shitty they were. 

“I’m working on it, Alvarez. I think we’re in for the long haul with this one.” 

“Long haul? What long haul? There is no haul, because there is no movement here! We’ve been deadlocked in this situation since the day he arrived.” 

She was right. He would be hard pressed to pinpoint a single area of improvement in the Jean situation, other than his lack of new bruises or broken bones. He had recovered most of his conditioning and strength, but it wasn’t a great situation. 

“I invited him to the holiday party?” 

“And? Is he coming out of his little cave to mingle with the rest of us peasants?” 

“He--Okay first, yes, he is. And secondly, I don’t think he thinks we’re peasants!” Jeremy protested. 

“Oh, sorry, I must have misread that snooty glare and the ‘How on earth are you Class I with this kind of conditioning’ bitching that we get every other practice from our baby Raven.” Alvarez cut off her words abruptly and looked vaguely uncomfortable. They all knew that calling Jean a Raven was….a complicated matter, to say the least. 

Jeremy gave her a disappointed look but didn’t want to get into the issue. It had been a tough few months for all of them. 

“We’ll see how he does at the party, okay?” 

Famous last words. 

\--   
The party started off innocuously enough. All of the Trojans gathered at the apartment that Laila and Alvarez shared. Jean followed Jeremy into the room and installed himself in the corner, near Laila’s favorite climbing vine, with a bottle of beer in his hand. 

Things started to slide downhill after some time, when the freshmen had had enough liquid courage to think that approaching Jean and peppering him with drunken questions was a good idea. To the credit of both Jean and the drunken freshman, the exchange started off relatively benign. 

“So… Moreau! What brought you here today? We never get to see this much of you.”

“Jeremy picked me up.”

“Oh cool, cool. Is that beer? Do you like it?”

“It’s not bad.”

Alvarez even joined in the conversation, piping in with, “It’s nice right? I found this local brewery in the area and one of the owners is a huge fan of Exy. We got a nice discount and everything.”

“That was lucky.”

So it wasn’t exactly scintillating conversation, but it was cordial, it was relatively relaxed, it was a win overall. 

The situation took a turn for the worse when some of the questions got a little more personal. 

“You’re so quiet all the time! Were you trained that way in the Ravens?” a daring second year asked. The players around her gasped and pushed each other, laughing. Nobody had dared yet to ask Jean about his time with the Ravens. 

“Ravens do not believe in socializing.”

“So they’re all quiet all the time? That sounds creepy.”

“It can seem unusual.”

Perhaps buoyed by their success, one of the more inebriated freshman asked, “So what’s the deal with these? The Ravens are so damn secretive, everyone has their bets on the real meaning. Why did only three of you have numbers?” He reached out to poke Jean on the cheek, near the tattoo.

Jean flinched violently away from the hand coming towards his face, hard enough to slam his head into the wall. 

Their corner of the room fell silent. 

Jean, in his mind, was panicking hard enough to fly apart. The conversation had been going decently well, he could acknowledge that. He kept his replies clipped but civil, trying to minimize the chances for anything to go wrong. 

By now, his head was aching with the effort it took to ignore everything around him--the semi-dark that only bode ill, the crowd around him, the wall at his back that both defended and trapped him. The flinch he couldn’t suppress, revealing the pathetic weakness he worked so hard to control. 

“...Hey, dude, chill, I wasn’t gonna mess with it, it’s just a tattoo. You okay?”

He struggled to control the viper in him, conditioned by the serpent’s nest of Evermore. The pounding in his head made it hard to think, and the beer had loosened his grip on his memories. 

“Just a tattoo,” he gritted out, “Don’t talk about shit you don’t understand.”

“Well, maybe we’d understand if you said more than three words at a time,” the other man shot back, “And if you ever bothered to talk about anything other than how shitty we are at practice.”

“Have you ever considered that you might not want to hear it?” Jean snapped, “ _Putain_ , have you ever thought outside of your tiny little mind and considered that I might not want to talk about it?”

He took a breath, intending to calm himself. Instead, he found words spilling out of his mouth, “You want to hear more about it? Why don’t we talk about this tattoo,” he said, the words hissing and cold. “I got it when I was 12. To use the word ‘got’ is misleading, since it implies that I wasn’t held down while it was carved in my face, and then beaten for daring to scream.”

If the corner was silent before, it was a vacuum of sound, now. 

“You want to know more of the Ravens? Why I can say your conditioning is shit?,” Jean bit out, venom escaping between his clenched teeth, “You, you think you’re fast, yes? And you know I’m still faster than you? Well, if I played with this speed at a Raven game, the Master would have caned my feet for daring to run so slow.” He was frustrated by the way that fear and anger made his R’s soft, slurred his TH’s, sharpened his i’s, let that hint of his heritage slip through. Riko had always hated it. 

He flung his arm out in an arc, encompassing all of the people gathered around him. “Have any of you played with broken fingers? The last championship game, I played with two broken fingers. Riko broke them because I was out of sync going for a rebound in our last practice game.” 

Jean stood, fists at his side, almost dizzy with panic. _Merde_. 

“Don’t talk about shit you don’t know.” 

He had dropped the cup at some point. The horrified faces in front of him blurred together. He gave up on holding himself together and ran. Nobody reached out to stop him. 

\---

 

2.

“Jean, can you give me a hand?” 

Jean set down the king’s cake on the table and surveyed the spread. He hadn’t been confident about his ability to make a traditional _gateau des rois_ , but the faint nostalgia he still had gave him the motivation to experiment and to learn. It looked pretty good to him, and his prior test batches had tasted good (Jeremy had been caught red handed, sneaking extra slices in his lunch box. That was as good an endorsement as any). 

He followed the sound of Jeremy’s voice down the hallway into the living room of their apartment. He smiled a little at the sight that awaited him: Jeremy, a bundle of fairy lights in his arms, straining to reach the curtain rods to hang them on. 

Three years later and there were still some days Jean could hardly believe that the tranquil peace between them was real. He thought of his first holiday season at USC and the unmitigated disaster that followed. Trauma flashbacks and terrified word vomit weren’t the ideal way to begin bonding with a team, but the Trojans had done their best to rally around him rather than recoil from his venom. 

Eventually, some regular group counseling for the team and private counseling for Jean had brought them to a better understanding of each other. Jean learned to channel his frustrations and fears in more productive manners, and to open up as a part of his healing. Jeremy and the rest of the Trojans learned about signs of trauma and how to tactfully deal with them, to avoid sending Jean into a spiral of flashbacks. 

“ _Attends_ , let me get that. You’re going to fall over if you’re not--” Jean lunged forward as Jeremy overbalanced while reaching up. He caught him just in time, thank goodness for Exy reflexes. He was about to straighten up and set Jeremy back on his feet when he was caught off guard by the look on Jeremy’s face. 

Jeremy was gazing up at him, some undefinable softness making his bright eyes warm and gentle. Words caught in Jean’s throat. Something about...something about the way Jeremy just relaxed, clearly comfortable and trusting Jean to hold him, made his breath stutter in his chest. (When had his life grown to encompass such comfort and ease?) 

“Ah...ok, here, up you go,” he said, finally breaking the silence. Jeremy smiled and leaned up for a quick kiss before he stood up and handed Jean the fairy lights. 

They worked quietly for a few minutes, Jean hanging the lights up wherever Jeremy pointed, and Jeremy busy with ornaments for the tree. From time to time, Jeremy would sidle up behind Jean and surprise him with a hug. 

“Are you just feeling particularly clingy today, or does decorating set you off somehow?” Jean asked with a smile. 

Jeremy grinned up at him, not letting go. 

“I just...I just really like seeing you like this. Happy and warm and right here in front of me,” he said honestly. He watched as Jeremy’s cheeks grew red as he looked away, trying to hide his face. He mumbled something that Jeremy couldn’t hear. 

“What was that?”

Jean turned back to him and caught Jeremy’s face between his hands. 

“I said, me too,” he replied, “ _T’es la lumière des mes nuits, l’amour de ma vie_.” His voice was quiet but steady as he leaned forward to steal a kiss. 

Now it was Jeremy’s turn to blush, all the way down to his neck. He buried his face in Jean’s sweater (dark green, soft and cabled, nothing like the stiff black shirts that he arrived with his first year), listening to the soothing repetition of his heartbeats. 

“Happy holidays, Jean.”

“Happy holidays, Jeremy.”

\--   
Omake: 

“Wait, you distracted me. We’re only halfway done decorating!”

“I’d say there were two parties in this entire situation, this is not solely my fault.”

“Okay, but the team is coming over in fifteen minutes! We need to speed up!” 

And all was well, they drank lots of hot cocoa, ate lots of good food, and had a giant puppy pile of cuddles because cuddles are joy and these beautiful boys deserve much joy in their lives.

**Author's Note:**

> Putain- literally means whore, but used as a generic curse word (i.e., fuck, etc)   
> Merde- shit   
> Gâteau des rois - king's cake, it's a holiday cake popular in France and other francophone regions (i.e. New Orleans)  
> Attends- wait   
> T'es la lumière des mes nuits, l'amour de ma vie- you are the light in my nights, the love of my life. I'm a sap and I love how it rhymes a bit. 
> 
> Disclaimer, I do speak French, but it's been years since I've lived there and I might be out of date on the curse words. Not to mention my grammar is rusty as fuck. 
> 
> \-   
> I posted this in my tablet and I've no clue how AO3 works. Will come back to check for grammar/spelling/posting errors.


End file.
